WashPost Op-Ed: ‘I Hate Christmas & You Should be Okay With That’

Procrastinators are unhappy people. Exhibit #784,963.

The Washington Post sends out a morning newsletter called Opinions A.M. It’s got all the fascinating takes from Ruth Milbank and Sargent Rubin and E.J. Capehart. The magazine also features guest opinions by experts and commentators from all ideologies. Its editors pay big attention to those op-eds which they believe are extremely important.

This was December 13th Post it! thought you should know that Brian Broome hates Christmas, “and you should be okay with that.” 

Brian Broome? Well, he’s the author of “Punch Me Up to the Gods,” of course. The memoir, you know. The New York Times Book Review called “a testament to the insurgent and ineradicable power of Black queer being.”

Now, I’m not sure if hating Christmas – or generally being a miserable pest – is part of “black queer being,” but it sure is part of Broome’s being. It’s also a result of too much TV. He’s obsessed with Christmas ads that “feature beautiful people wearing violently colorful sweaters and pouring fine liquor into glistening glassware,” and where “still more beautiful people are surprised by enormous red bows on top of expensive cars.” He hates jewelry store ads and spots for Hallmark Channel movies.

Worse:

Now, the stores I shop at for my Hungry-Man frozen dinners are giddy with silver and red as a celebration of unchecked capitalism.

Don’t laugh! He’s serious. He even hated Christmas as a kid “because my family didn’t have money.” His dad lost his job when the local steel mill closed. This is not something to be taken lightly. 

But Broome’s fixation on advertising is:

 … the commercials with shiny, happy, children opening reams of colorful paper to reveal the things that they’d always wanted. It seemed that more material meant you would be a better person. These commercials taught me that only good people get presents, and my family is trash. It was like communion to me that I took this information into my heart every year.

Or, a constant diet of resentment. And he hates pretending he doesn’t resent … well, everyone, really. Family (“I found that family can be challenging when thrust upon you all at once.”) People in general (“It’s harder for me to reconcile the good will we’re supposed to feel toward each other at the holidays with the horrible way we treat each other the rest of the year.”)

Broome describes himself spending Christmas “watching horror movies alone and eating Chinese take-away. Someone you know, and love, may prefer this option.”

They might. They’re welcome to it. But that’s not really enough, is it? The rest of us are supposed to register Broome’s misanthropy, acknowledge it, and be a little less happy ourselves.

“We don’t speak up, us holiday haters,” Broome says. “We tend to keep our feelings to ourselves.” Or publish them in The Washington Post.